How to Hire Caregivers: An Employer's Guide

A caregiver is the hire that keeps your client schedule intact. The work is non-medical: companionship and conversation, meal preparation, light housekeeping, errands and transportation, medication reminders where your state's rules and your own policies allow, and hands-on help with bathing, dressing and getting around. What your agency adds is structure — recruiting for the role, matching the right person to each client, and covering every visit on the care plan.

Reliability is the product. When one caregiver calls off, a client's morning, an afternoon reminder visit and a family member's workday all unravel at once, and your office spends the day re-running routes instead of growing them. Hiring for this role is really hiring for coverage, so every step below — qualifications, screening, pay, the offer — points at the same question: will this person show up on time to every visit and use good judgment in someone's home?

Where the hire fits depends on what your organization provides. Private-pay non-medical agencies and franchises, assisted living and memory care communities, adult day centers and residential care homes are among the settings that staff caregiver roles. An agency may also field caregivers alongside CNAs and home health aides, so decide per client whether an assignment needs non-medical help or certified-aide scope before you post the role.

The occupation is large. BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics counted 4,305,810 home health and personal care aides (SOC 31-1120) in payroll employment for May 2025. There is no separate "caregiver" line in that data — BLS publishes home health aides and personal care aides as one combined group — so use it as the occupation's benchmark and label it that way when you set budgets.

The worker's side of this job — what the day looks like, what draws people into the field, and how they choose between caregiver, CNA and HHA roles — lives in the caregiver career guide. This page stays on your side of the hire.

The qualifications to write into a posting come from your state's rules for the services your agency provides — not from the job title itself. "Caregiver" covers assignments from companionship visits to hands-on personal care, and the requirements follow what the assignment includes, who pays for the care, and where you operate.

For the occupation as a whole, BLS's Employment Projections table lists typical entry education as a high school diploma or equivalent, with short-term on-the-job training. That describes how people enter the field; it is not the rule for your agency. States that regulate in-home care agencies write the training, orientation and competency checks their caregivers need into those rules, and the detail differs state by state.

Oregon's rule for in-home care agencies (OAR 333-536) shows what a state's list looks like in practice. Its in-home care agency caregivers must:

• Be at least 18 and complete an agency-specific orientation of at least 4 hours before independently providing services.
• Finish at least 8 hours of initial training — 2 hours before providing services and 6 more within 120 days of hire, with up to 1 hour of competency evaluation counting toward the 8.
• Have competency evaluated through direct observation plus written or oral testing before working independently.
• Complete at least 4 hours of basic non-injectable medication training before being assigned medication services.
• Complete at least 6 hours of education annually, plus 1 more hour when they provide medication services.
• Note the exemption: a caregiver who proves a current Oregon health-care related license or certificate is excused from the training, though the agency orientation still applies.

Oregon is one state's rule, not a template. Whatever your state requires comes from the state agency that oversees home care where you operate, and it applies to your postings and your training files as written there. If you also staff certified roles, treat the credentials as separate: ask your state agency which requirements apply to a certified nursing assistant or home health aide hire rather than assuming one credential covers another.

Rules change, and they are state-specific. Confirm the qualification, training and competency requirements that apply to your agency with the state agency that oversees home care in your state before you write them into a posting or an offer.

Sourcing has to run continuously in this field, because the demand numbers leave no quiet season. BLS Employment Projections put home health and personal care aide employment at 4,677,100 jobs in 2025, growing 18.1% to a projected 5,524,400 by 2035, with 760,500 openings projected each year.

PHI, a direct care research and policy organization, separately projects an estimated 9.7 million total job openings in direct care from 2024 to 2034 once occupational transfers and labor-force exits are counted alongside new jobs. The two series differ — BLS projects 2025 to 2035, while PHI's estimate covers 2024 to 2034 — but they point the same direction: an occupation adding hundreds of thousands of openings every year.

Build the channels you can operate directly first: employee referrals with a structured reward, rehires and previous applicants already in your file, and your own job postings. Local training programs and community colleges, community and workforce organizations, and staffing agencies for short-term coverage gaps extend the list where you need reach beyond your own pipeline.

The channel detail — which boards deserve budget, how to word the ad, how referral rewards are structured — belongs to the recruitment strategy guide. Before you publish, browse the caregiver jobs board to see the postings your ad will compete against and what candidates in your market are being offered.

Screen every candidate through the same sequence, in the same order: application review, a phone screen, an interview, reference calls with former supervisors or clients, then the background screening your state requires. A fixed sequence treats candidates consistently and leaves you a record of how each hire was made.

State rules set what you must run and when. Oregon's in-home care agency rule — the same example as above — requires agencies to run a criminal records check and make a fitness determination before hiring anyone who will have direct contact with clients (OAR 333-536). What your state adds to that, and what your payer contracts add on top, belongs on the checklist you build for each role.

When the hire is a certified nursing assistant rather than a caregiver, an active listing on the state nurse aide registry belongs in your verification steps before the first shift. Which checks apply to which role in your agency is a state-by-state question, so build the checklist per role instead of reusing one form everywhere.

The step-by-step — what to order, in what order, and with which written disclosures — is the background checks guide's territory. Confirm your screening sequence with the state agencies that regulate your setting, or with health-care counsel, before you hire.

BLS's OEWS draws no "caregiver" line of its own. The closest published group is home health and personal care aides (SOC 31-1120), which BLS reports combined — so benchmark against it, and label it as the broader group rather than a caregiver wage when you take numbers into a budget meeting.

In the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, the group earned a national median of $17.21 an hour — $35,800 a year — with a 10th-to-90th percentile hourly range of $13.00 to $21.65, in payroll employment of 4,305,810.

The industry row moves the median. Aides in home health care services (NAICS 621600) had a median of $17.42 an hour. In services for the elderly and persons with disabilities (NAICS 624120) — the row where most non-medical home care agencies are classified, though individual agencies may be coded under home health care services — the median was $16.73, with 2,274,140 employed. In continuing care retirement communities and assisted living facilities (NAICS 623300), it was $17.82, with 265,100 employed. These are May 2025 medians by industry row: benchmarks to set a range against, not offers to copy.

Treat the tables as the floor of the conversation. What you need to offer is set by the postings caregivers in your market are actually comparing against yours, so check live listings next to the BLS benchmarks. The percentile detail and state-by-state figures sit on the caregiver salary data pages.

Budget the wage-hour rules into the offer before you post it. Since January 1, 2015, third-party employers such as home care agencies cannot claim the FLSA companionship-services exemption: your agency owes caregivers at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked, plus overtime at time-and-a-half over 40 hours in a workweek. What that means for visit scheduling, travel time and live-in arrangements is worked through in the companionship exemption and overtime guide.

Interview against the assignment rather than a generic script. The questions worth asking are about coverage and judgment. How does the candidate handle a client who refuses a task? What do they do when traffic puts the next visit at risk? When do they call the office instead of handling something alone, and how would they report a change they noticed during a visit? Listen for answers that stay inside the role and report up the chain.

Run a skills check that mirrors the tasks the assignment actually includes — a supervised transfer, a bathing routine, a meal-preparation and reminder visit — as a working interview or a structured demonstration. Give every candidate the same check so you compare like against like.

Keep interview questions about the job and the candidate's work history, and check your script against the EEOC's hiring guidance and your state labor agency's rules before you start scheduling interviews.

Call references yourself rather than delegating all of them. A short conversation with a former supervisor tells you more about call-offs, boundaries and punctuality than a written file: ask whether the person showed up on schedule, how they handled a refused task, and whether they would rehire them.

Then put the offer in writing, with the concrete terms of the job. Name the schedule and the routes or shifts it covers, the hourly rate, and how travel between clients is paid. Add mileage and transportation expectations, the training you provide and when it happens, and the client types and settings the role covers, so the candidate can compare your offer with others on the same terms.

Onboarding starts before the first solo visit. Sequence your program around whatever your state's rules require — in Oregon, at least a 4-hour agency orientation before independent work, with the initial training on the schedule shown above. Then layer your own run-through on top: documentation, the clock-in routine your scheduling system uses, and the office's escalation path for changes in a client's condition.

Pair every new caregiver with an experienced one for shadow shifts on the routes they will actually cover, name the supervisor they report to, and put a check-in on the calendar before problems have time to become resignations. The plan in the caregiver onboarding guide walks those first weeks.

Keep the training calendar running after week one. Oregon requires at least 6 hours of education annually for in-home care agency caregivers, plus 1 more hour when they provide medication services. Mirroring that rhythm in your own program keeps skills current and your training files documented, alongside whatever your state requires of your agency.

Retention is where the hiring math pays out. PHI attributes direct care workers' median annual earnings of just under $26,000 to low wages and part-time hours — annual earnings that include part-time work, which is why the figure sits below the BLS full-year median for home health and personal care aides. The levers it points at are hours and wages, and both are yours to set. Judge your own retention from your own records — separations, exit reasons, how long new hires stay — then fix what your records name.

The playbook is the caregiver retention guide, and the scheduling, overtime and wage-hour topics around it sit in the employer hiring guide.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, medical, benefits or tax advice. Training, screening and pay rules come from the state agencies and federal bodies named above — confirm the current requirements with the state agency that oversees home care in your state, the DOL, or your own attorney or CPA before you hire.